As is known, operating electronic devices produce heat. This heat should be removed from the devices in order to maintain device junction temperatures within desirable limits, with failure to remove the beat thus produced resulting in increased device temperatures, potentially leading to thermal runaway conditions. Several trends in the electronics industry have combined to increase the importance of thermal management, including heat removal for electronic devices in technologies where thermal management has traditionally been less of a concern, such as CMOS. In particular, the need for faster and more densely packed circuits has had a direct impact on the importance of thermal management. First, power dissipation, and therefore heat production, increases as device operating frequencies increase. Second, increased operating frequencies may be possible at lower device junction temperatures. Further, as more and more devices are packed onto a single chip, power density (Watts/cm2) increases, resulting in the need to remove more power from a given size chip or module. These trends have combined to create applications where it is no longer desirable to remove heat from modern devices solely by traditional air cooling methods, such as by using air cooled heat sinks with heat pipes or vapor chambers. Such air cooling techniques are inherently limited in their ability to extract heat from an electronic device with high power density.
Thus, the need to cool current and future high heat load, high heat flux electronic devices, mandates the development of aggressive thermal management techniques, such as liquid jet impingement or liquid cooled cold plate devices, to cool electronic devices, including integrated circuit chips. The invention disclosed herein is addressed to this continuing need for enhanced liquid based cooling apparatuses and methods.